Homes for Ukraine: Visa Application Centres

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, the Polish Government and Polish people are doing amazing work in supporting those who have crossed the border from Ukraine. We have provided £30 million to Poland to help with providing temporary shelter, education and other basic services. We have also provided things like blankets and hydro kits to Moldova, which, as he will know, is similarly seeing significant pressures in terms of those who have crossed the border. As part of a wider package, we have had on the ground UK teams from the Home Office who have been supporting people at our visa application centres. A range of support is being given. I recently met the Visegrád Group ambassadors to talk about what they were seeing in terms of giving support and what lessons had been learned about how we can provide more. That support will need to continue. Of course we all hope that in the near future Putin’s forces will be defeated and that the next thing we can do is to support people to return home.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

In 2019 the all-party parliamentary group on Africa, which I chair, published a detailed and damning report on the visa application centres. Many of the points we made on outsourcing, TLScontact, digitalisation, scanning, data reconciliation, training and resourcing have clearly not been addressed, and now Ukrainians fleeing war and my constituents who want to help them—I have many such constituents—are paying the price. Exactly how will the Minister ensure that visa processing is immediately speeded up? Given that he will not reduce the requirements of the process, as Labour has been calling for, can he confirm that that means that visa applicants from other places in the world will see further delays?

[Kevin Foster]

In terms of the future of visa application centres and the report published three years ago, the hon. Member is welcome to read some of the documentation we have put out about the changes as part of the future border and immigration system to significantly reduce the number of people who have to use a visa application centre, with many more either using biometrics or being able to make their applications fully online rather than having to go to a centre. We have already significantly speeded up the granting of visas under the two schemes relating to Ukraine, with just under 90,000 having been issued and more being issued every day. In the long term, our vision is to move away from visa application centres being the main place where people make their application, as already shown by what has happened with the biometric bypass route—the vast majority of applications are now being made via that rather than at an application centre.